04-09-2010
• Care2.com via NaturalNews
Transplant patients sometimes take on part of their donors’
personalities.

Glenda lost her husband, David, in a car crash. She made his organs
available for transplant. A few years later, as part of a study by
neuropsychologist Paul Pearsall, she met the young Spanish-speaking man
who had received her late husband’s heart. Filled with emotion, Glenda
asked if she could lay her hand on his chest. “I love you, David,” she
said. “Everything’s copa­cetic.”

The young man’s mother, also present, was startled. “My son uses that
word now,” she said. “He never said it before his heart transplant. I
don’t know that word; it doesn’t exist in Spanish. But it was the first
thing he said after the operation.”

Her son appeared to have changed in other ways too. Before, he had
been a health-conscious vegetarian; now he craved meat and greasy food.
He had loved heavy metal music; now he played nothing but fifties rock
’n’ roll. Glenda’s husband had been an ardent meat-lover and played in a
rock ’n’ roll band.

Does the heart have a memory? Is part of an organ donor’s personality
also transferred to the recipient in a transplant? Yes, contends
Pearsall in his book The Heart’s Code, which provides other
remarkable examples of transplanted hearts with memories.

An 8-year-old girl received the heart of a 10-year-old girl who had
been murdered. The recipient ended up at a psychiatrist’s office,
plagued by nightmares about her donor’s murderer. She said she knew who
the man was. After a few sessions, the psychiatrist decided to notify
the police. Following the girl’s instructions, they tracked down the
murderer. The man was convicted on evidence she had provided the first
clues about: the time, the weapon, the place, the clothes he wore, what
his victim told him. Everything the girl said turned out to be true.

Pearsall’s book is based on 73 heart-transplant cases in which parts
of the donors’ personalities appear to have been transferred to the
recipients.

Pearsall argues that the brain is not the only centre of human
intelligence. The heart, he says, carries equal importance. He posits
that the body is made up of cells that transmit “information.” Cells
communicate this information to each other electromagnetically. Thus a
transplanted organ can continue to broadcast old information, something
like amputees’ experience of pain in lost limbs. Phenomena like these
suggest cells have memories.

Critics deny the existence of proof that memories can be transplanted
along with organs, and fear such assertions will cause donor numbers to
fall. Some non-believers attribute personality changes in transplant
recipients to the heavy drugs they must take to prevent organ rejection.

But what should we make of the documented story of an 8-year-old
Jewish boy who died in a car wreck? His death was the salvation of a
3-year-old Arab girl with a dangerous heart condition. As soon as the
girl woke up from the anaesthesia after surgery, she asked by name for a
type of Jewish candy she could not have known existed.

Pearsall’s book raises fascinating questions that shake the
foundations of science.